It was majority employee-owned before the acquisition but is now majority owned by private equity firm. The main change I’m noticing is that everyone is being pressured to work uncompensated overtime (we’re all on salary here) and requests for training/professional development have been all but eliminated. They also initially hired a bunch of new employees with no specific work in mind and expected us to find the new people work to do then got rid of a lot of people about 1 year afterwards.

Has anyone else rode out a private equity buyout? It’s not terrible, but it is extra stress on top of an already stressful job. Is it a good idea to get out now? I’ve heard they typically sell after around 5 years of “optimization”. What happens then?

  • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
    70·
    5 months ago

    Private equity will suck as much money out of the company as they can until it starts to fail and then they’ll sell it. Firing employees and making others do their work for no extra pay, if you have patents they’ll sell those, close facilities and force everyone into smaller spaces… literally nothing is off limits. Idk how much is publicly available, but if it is you can look at Avaya for an example. Went from being literally the biggest supplier of phones in the world with the majority of patents on applications for telecom technology to going bankrupt and having to restructure. They’re now on a single floor in a shitty building and most work has been outsourced.

    • zout@fedia.io
      38·
      5 months ago

      You forgot that besides the patents sell-off, they’ll sell just anything the company owns to another company owned by them, just to lease everything back so the company can accumulate dept. In the same trend work gets sent to sub-contractors owned by them, and consultants get hired to make sure the value of the company rises because they invest in getting better at whatever.

      Also, If most off these things don’t happen at your company, then all value is allready extracted and only the depts will pile up until bankruptcy.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        they’ll sell just anything the company owns to another company owned by them, just to lease everything back so the company can accumulate dept

        I’m assuming the last word was meant to be debt. How is this legal when it’s blatantly obvious that they’re essentially stealing money from their other debtors when they file bankruptcy? This is just theft with a few more steps.

        • zout@fedia.io
          5·
          5 months ago

          I meant debt indeed. And as long as the company survives, nobody is going to investigate where the cash is flowing. If it does go bankrupt, someone might. The question is, who is going to pay for the investigation to prove the wrong doing?